


La maison

by Aza (sazandorable)



Series: PeterMartin Week 2020 [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (no underage or anything like that but do check out the CW inside), Eros & Thanatos & how to fuck up a perfectly good child, M/M, unenthusiastic consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:32:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27498748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sazandorable/pseuds/Aza
Summary: For PeterMartin week 2020, day 2: home.Peter takes Martin to Moorland House.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Peter Lukas
Series: PeterMartin Week 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2009578
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	La maison

**Author's Note:**

> titled after the Yann Tiersen [track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7SidBvTcxg), and also just french for 'the house'.
> 
> CW: nothing very detailed or graphic but: general depression, dissociation, Lukas-typical child abuse/neglect (non-physical, not detailed), Peter-typical smarminess, unenthusiastic consent that can read as abuser taking advantage of bad headspace.

The house is more of a small mansion, really. Country house? Martin doesn’t really know the specifics of those things. The most he knows comes from watching a few hours of Downton Abbey in the care home lounge with a bunch of incomprehensible but very chattery old ladies on one of those visits when his mum refused to let him into her room. They’re probably all dead now, the old ladies. And this house doesn’t look like an ex abbey.

It is _not_ , technically, huge, it’s just quite big but it’s not, like, Buckingham Palace (nor Downton Abbey). And it’s not empty; it’s perfectly serviceable and clearly in constant use. But it is _huge_ and _empty_ in the sense that there is so much space and so few people, so little life. The rooms are wide and have _just_ too little furniture in order to still seem bare: the hall is big enough for the family to gather without gathering, a spot for everyone to hover — in a doorway, in a corner, on a single chair — alone.

Peter doesn’t greet anyone, doesn’t make any introductions. “The funeral proper is a family-only affair, but it won’t take very long,” he simply says, with a yawn he doesn’t bother to hide. “Not like there’s going to be long speeches. Feel free to look around the house, Martin.”

For the entire ride he wasn’t sure why Peter brought him along — funerals are not exactly a bring-your-coworker-along affair — but it becomes clear by the second room. Peter had said something about it being educational for Martin.

Yeah. It explains a lot of things.

The dining room table is long with one single chair at each end to stare down the space between them. Only one armchair by the squeaky clean hearth in this salon. All the bedrooms isolated from each other with their own bathroom, all of them furnished with a massive double bed but only enough closet space for one person, a night table and lamp on one side only. Drab carpeting swallows the sounds of footsteps, thick doors and walls prevent noises from spreading between rooms. No personality, either; no knick knacks or books on the shelves, no material or dedicated space for anyone’s hobbies, nothing lying half-started on any table. Picture frames on the walls, but it’s all perfectly impersonal landscapes that all look like variations of what the Lonely looks like to Martin: the ones that aren’t marine are cloudy mountaintops or valleys, countryside in the morning mists, foggy smoggy empty city streets at night. Not a single human figure in sight in any of them, of course.

This is Peter’s childhood house, Martin knows. He tries to imagine a kid being raised in this house, growing up in this house, developing in this kind of environment, and can’t. He didn’t see any in the hall. Even when he stumbles into what clearly is a child’s room, he can’t accept it as having housed a young life, can’t picture an actual child standing in this pale room with its dreary empty walls and its somehow severe-looking furniture. The toys are all soulless, manufactured blank things and in near-mint condition, neatly put away in a crate. There’s no drawings pinned up, no chaos, no hug wear on the painfully standard teddy bear.

Martin sits on the small bed, lets out a tiny cough at the cloud of dust it raises, and, for a guilty minute, he savours the feeling of not wishing to trade his childhood for someone else’s.

And then it’s longer than a minute.

There’s no way to know how long he’s gone: nothing has happened, nothing has changed, but he knows he’s been losing time a lot lately, just zoning out and into cloud brain land. At some point, anyway, he hears a noise and, slowly, coalesces from fog back into his body, in this room, in this house, and is present enough again to turn his head.

Peter is leaning on the doorframe, looking around the room with a wistful little smile. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he chirps, insufferably happy. “I hate having to come here and see the family, but I do miss the house. Naturally.”

Jesus Christ.

“This was my bedroom, did you know? Still is, I suppose.”

Martin puts his face in his hands for a second. “Somehow, I’m not surprised,” he admits.

Peter pushes off the doorframe and steps inside. “It’s not like they’re deliberately preserving it, just that it hasn’t been needed. There’s not any good kid currently.” He looks around with blithe non-curiosity, runs a hand along the dust-covered top of the low dresser, tugs on the ear of a stuffed animal. “I’m sortof meant to provide, technically, but no one is really counting on that. I think Mother is keeping an eye out on my runaway siblings’ children, for one to retrieve. They’re all miserable, one of them’s bound to grow up suitable eventually.”

Martin carefully breathes out, deep, long. “So it’s just boring, ordinary grooming, then? Not even,” he snorts, “some sinister supernatural bloodline curse or the house being haunted?”

“Nope!” Peter confirms cheerfully, sitting down next to him. His body is just as cold as the decades-empty bed and the drafty hallways. “It all starts out human. It’s all human-inflicted, by others or ourselves.”

Peter leans sideways and breathes into Martin’s ear. His breath, too, is cold, yet Martin doesn’t shiver. He’s been that cold himself for a while already. “Want to inflict ourselves to each other?”

Martin focuses on exhaling a full breath again before he points out: “At a funeral, in your childhood bed?”

Peter shrugs. “Some cousin, didn’t know him. Obviously. It’s still my bed.”

Like he’d have anything against having sex in someone else’s bed anyway, Martin thinks, but even the petty vindictiveness is dulled. He knows the morals and propriety, but he doesn’t truly _care_ , right now, or maybe anymore at all.

Peter nuzzles into the starched collar of his shirt and presses into his flank some more, tips them over, slowly, slowly, and Martin doesn’t wiggle away the first second, nor the next, nor the next, nor when he’s lazily pinned down on the child-sized mattress (still large, so large, so wide and empty), nor when Peter’s large strong hand makes its way into the trousers of the smart suit he rented just for Martin.

Martin scratches Peter’s short hair and sighs and stares at the ceiling, and the thing is, it’s not any worse than the ceiling of his own childhood bedroom. This house isn’t any worse than the house where he was born or the one where he grew up after or his shitty London flat; getting fucked in a Lukas’s childhood bed does not feel particularly horrifying, doesn’t feel particularly different from getting laid in his own lonely bed.

“It feels like home,” he murmurs, and Peter laughs cold in his neck and kisses his throat.


End file.
